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The research reported in this paper concerns the ongoing development of a Knowledge Intensive Sketching (KiS) framework through which designers are supported in foreseeing directly from their paper-based sketches the relevant life-cycle consequences of their ‘component form’ solution concepts. The goal of the KiS framework is to retain the important characteristics of freehand sketching, i.e. pencil and paper, whilst at the same time exploit the benefits of Knowledge Intensive CAD technology for proactively guiding designers in generating life-oriented solutions as from early design.

This is a very nice and interesting paper which reviews and sets out the rationales for investing in emerging markets, the experiences with investing in emerging market equities over the last few years, and draws some lessons from the experience in December 1994 in Mexico. The issues raised by the authors are indeed the important ones, for investors as well as policy makers in emerging markets. At the same time, this is a difficult paper to comment on: one is more likely to disagree with the tone of its conclusions than with any of the issues raised or the analysis done.

The notion of computational model is central to the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing. It defines an abstract model for distributed computations and characterizes at the same time the functionality of a supporting distributed virtual machine. Most current distributed systems, including e.g. the CORBA platforms, have converged on a subset of this computational model. In this paper, we review the model, providing a formal characterization for it, and we discuss various directions for extensions, considering in particular different trends in distributed systems construction.

A search was made on the CAB ABSTRACTS database for all scientific papers by the 16 speakers at this Symposium (Intercellular Signalling in the Mammary Gland, Hannah Research Institute, Ayr, UK, 13–15 April 1994) published since 1984. A total of 475 records was retrieved from the database.

This paper presents a schema that attempts to embrace all graphic language. The essence of the schema is shown in a matrix which presents a number of theoretical possibilities in terms of approaches to graphic language. One axis of the matrix describes the methods of configuration of graphic language, using such terms as pure linear, linear interrupted, list, linear branching, matrix, non-linear directed, non-linear open. The other axis describes the modes of symbolization of graphic language, using four somewhat crude categories: verbal/numerical, pictorial and verbal/numerical, pictorial, schematic. Numerous, examples are shown to clarify terms and the underlying concepts they describe. It is emphasized that the matrix is a device for directing thinking, rather than a means of defining graphic language. The paper is written from the standpoint of a practising graphic designer. The matrix is used to illustrate the wide range of approaches open to us in graphic language and the effect this is assumed to have on reading/viewing strategies and cognitive processes. It is mggested that the matrix is useful in focusing attention on two fundamental questions that ought always to be asked when deciding how a graphic message should be communicated: What should be the mode of symbolization and what should be the method of configuration? Legibility and related research is briefly reviewed in order to establish what light it throws on these questions; with a few notable exceptions it is found wanting. It is suggested that there is a need for more research that crosses the boundaries of the cells of the matrix. This paper is not the culmination of a sustained programme of research and brings no firm evidence to bear on any aspect of graphic language. It is the contribution of a graphic designer who has had the opportunity of associating with research workers concerned with the evaluation of graphic language, and is written as a tutorial paper to stimulate thought and discussion. It is an attempt to define the scope of graphic language and to show relationships between different approaches to it that have been, and can be, used. Throughout the paper, the totality of graphic language and its specifically graphic variables are emphasized. Though the approach may appear to be somewhat theoretical, it is intended that it should have practical implications.

This chapter offers a critical survey of evidence for functionally separable mechanisms in word recognition, and a theoretical framework for interpreting the contributions of linguistic, especially lexical, knowledge in both pre-attentive processing and conscious perception of written words. Section 1 reviews evidence for independent parallel systems responsible for graphemic access to semantic and conceptual knowledge, and for conversion of alphabetic script into a phonological representation. The role of phonological coding in silent reading is discussed, including its role in interpreting certain syntactic components of text. Section 2 discusses the effects of orthographic regularity and lexicality in the identification of words and letter strings. Evidence is summarized favouring an intermediate, tacit stage of letter identification. Contrasts between the recognition of words and of pictures are explored. Section 3 introduces a procedural model for the mental lexicon, illustrated by means of the MARGIE system, in relation to both referential and syntagmatic word-meanings. It emphasizes the role in reading of pre-attentive expectations (contextual facilitation effects) generated by parallel, production-like mechanisms. Evidence of preattentive lexical access is surveyed. In Section 4 theoretical issues concerning perceptual integration and its central place in the mechanism of word perception are raised. Some models of the integration process are also reviewed. Some of the best camouflaged conceptual traps for psychologists lie in the way ordinary language is used to perform a quasi-technical role in the description of behaviour. “Word recognition” is full of such traps. “Recognition,” like “perception,” appears to refer both to the “discriminative uptake” of information from the senses and (in the adult human) to the ability to report or comment upon it, in answer to the question “What did you perceive?” Yet there are many illustrations of the dissociation between these two abilities. One striking example is the phenomenon that Weiskrantz and colleagues have termed “blindsight” (Weiskrantz, Warrington, Sanders, & Marshall, 1974). Although subjectively blind in one quadrant of the visual field after surgical removal of a major portion of the calcarine visual cortex, one patient could reach with great accuracy to small visual objects and make crude shape-discriminations in the “blind” region. Throughout testing the patient remained convinced that he was guessing, and denied any awareness of “seeing” the stimuli.

A technological display is the interface between the human and technological systems. This tutorial is concerned with computer-based systems and displays that enable humans to interact with computers, and most of the examples are taken from real-time systems. It is with these systems that display design becomes most critical, since the human must respond accurately under speed stress. The displays must help the human comprehend complex and rapidly changing system events. Due to limitations in display size, the data are often highly coded and difficult to interpret. The learn- ability and memorability of displays are therefore important aspects of display design. The field of technological displays can be described in terms of certain broad categories. From a presentation point of view, displays can be classified as either alphanumeric or graphic. Within the field of alphanumeric CRT displays, a further distinction occurs between the conversational mode, where input is limited to a specific CRT location, and the formatted display that allows entry at pre-specified locations anywhere on a fixed mask. These types of displays are illustrated with examples from real-time telephone traffic management systems. The fundamental display design process consists of eight major steps that carry the designer from the initial analysis of the operating system to the detailed formatting of each display. At each stage the designer makes decisions based on adequate knowledge of human needs and limitations. Specific areas for additional psychological research are pointed out. In its broadest sense, the technological display is any presentation of data associated with an engineering or scientific discipline. To narrow things somewhat, it is necessary to distinguish between real-time displays and non-real-time displays. The distinction has more to do with the intended mode of use by the human than with the data or their method of generation. A display is an aid to the performance of some task. The user of the real-time display is involved in tasks that force him to decode and encode information within a rapidly changing environment. The speedometer in a car is an example. It is updated frequently and the driver needs to obtain information in a brief glance. If the display lags behind the speed of the auto or if it is difficult to determine quickly the current reading, the display is poorly designed. Thus, in general, real-time displays have the advantage that they can be objectively evaluated by the criteria of speed and accuracy of use.

Non-wood fibers were the first material ever used by mankind for paper production and had played a dominant role until about one hundred years ago. Today, non-wood fibers such as bagasse and straw remain an important pulping raw material in certain developing countries with limited forest resources. In addition, non-wood fibers such as abaca, sisal, flax, jute, and hemp are used to produce specialty papers in several countries.

In the last few years bureaucratic procedures didn't show a significant reduction in the volume of paper documents created. In order to reduce the huge amount of space for archiving and preserving documents and to speed up the secarh process, a semantic-based dematerialization process should be performed. In this paper we describe a novel system that manages several kind of bureaucratic documents in the e-gov domain, automatically extracts several interesting information and produces a suitable semantic representation that may be considered as the first step towards a full automated document management system. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

The handling of insider attacks is a significant technical challenge as little assurance theory and design practice exists to guide the design of effective, credible countermeasures for large systems and applications. Much of the relevant theory has focused on insider attacks on individual security protocols and smallscale applications. In this position paper, we suggest that confidence in a system’s resilience to insider attacks can emerge by the application of well-accepted survivability principles and design methods. We caution, however, that different tradeoffs emerge in applying these principles to practical designs, thereby requiring a careful balance among the costs of countering insider attacks, recovery from attack, and attack deterrence, and between the fine granularity of access permissions and ability to administer these permissions is a safe manner. In view of the dearth of practical solutions for surviving insider attacks in any significant-size system, we suggest that experiments in applying well-accepted principles and design methods to critical subsystems (e.g., user authentication, DNS) are necessary to provide effective and quantifiable assurances.

“Forsoksgymnaset in Oslo” was an experiment in School Democracy that started classes in automatic data processing in the fall of 1968 as a part of school mathematics in the 11th year. We started simple programming in FORTRAN on punched cards, off line. Later we had a teletype terminal with paper tape, changed to the BASIC language, and ran programs online by telephone to a distant computer. We also designed the logic simulator “Benjamin”, with four “And”, “Or”, and “Not” elements, battery and lamps, which could be connected in logical networks to be studied. In 1970, we arranged two two-day seminars for teachers during the Christmas and the summer holidays and presented the whole course. We did this eight times and helped to qualify many teachers. The first Examen Artium in Data was organised in June 1970.

The origin of the word “soap” is traced to sacrificial Mount Sapo of ancient Roman legend. The mixture of fat and wood ashes that reacted to form soap was carried by rain to the banks of the Tiber River and was found as a clay deposit useful for cleaning clothes [1]. The chemistry (reactions, raw materials, and functional properties) of bar soaps as well as the manufacturing technology (processes and equipment) are reviewed. In addition, synthetic detergents (raw materials, types of surfactants, additives, production processes, consumption, and detergent trending) are examined.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the electronic exchange of standard business documents in a structured and computer-processable form. The purpose of EDI is to enable a quick way to process business documents. EDI also facilitates paperless trading and it is a new way to conduct business. EDI solves some problems in the traditional paper document flow, including: Process delay caused by physical delivery of documents, and the reentering of data by the trading partners; Low accuracy of data that have been re-entered by the trading partners; High labor cost for re-entering data; Unexpected document loss; Uncertainty of payment source.

Plants, such as flax, cotton, hemp, jute, sisal, kenaf, coir, pineapple, ramie, bamboo, banana, as well as wood, are a source of lignocellulosic fibers. Their availability, renewability, low density and price as well as satisfactory mechanical properties make them attractive reinforcing fibers in the manufacture of composites. The natural fiber containing composites are used in transportation (automobiles, railway coaches, aero-space), military applications, building and construction industries (ceiling paneling, partition boards), packaging, and consumer products.

Due to growing interest in using natural language interfaces, it is appropriate to begin discussing their evaluation. This position paper presents the point of view that natural language interfaces offer special problems for evaluation, compared to problems encountered with other computer software. If ignored, such problems will make evaluation ineffectual. First, the paper describes the purposes and dimensions of problems in such an evaluation; differing purposes dictate differing approaches to evaluating natural language interfaces. Then, the paper points out some issues that turn out to be red herrings, and suggests a modest proposal that covers much of the broad spectrum of difficult issues involved. Since some of the issues and problems are common to both expert systems and natural language interfaces, comparisons of issues in evaluation of expert systems is also provided.

Although wool finishing is as old as clothmaking itself, it is only comparatively recently that the subject has been treated in a scientific manner. Cloth as it is received from the loom or the knitting machine is generally unacceptable to the consumer, as it is often greasy and dirty and is aesthetically unattractive. The object of finishing is to convert the “gray” cloth into a more desirable state. Until comparatively recently this was done by a sequence of operations which involved such processes as inspection of gray material, setting (crabbing or blowing), scouring, milling, hydroextracting, drying, raising, brushing, cutting, dry blowing (semidecating), and pressing. The precise details of these operations vary according to the type of cloth and differ from factory to factory. Examples of the routine adopted in finishing several of the more common wool fabrics are described in the literature(1) and form the basis of all wool finishing.

Funder: University of Cambridge, In this paper we study a class of fast geometric image inpainting methods based on the idea of filling the inpainting domain in successive shells from its boundary inwards. Image pixels are filled by assigning them a color equal to a weighted average of their already filled neighbors. However, there is flexibility in terms of the order in which pixels are filled, the weights used for averaging, and the neighborhood that is averaged over. Varying these degrees of freedom leads to different algorithms, and indeed the literature contains several methods falling into this general class. All of them are very fast, but at the same time all of them leave undesirable artifacts such as “kinking” (bending) or blurring of extrapolated isophotes. Our objective in this paper is to build a theoretical model in order to understand why these artifacts occur and what, if anything, can be done about them. Our model is based on two distinct limits: a continuum limit in which the pixel width h→0 and an asymptotic limit in which h>0 but h≪1. The former will allow us to explain “kinking” artifacts (and what to do about them) while the latter will allow us to understand blur. Both limits are derived based on a connection between the class of algorithms under consideration and stopped random walks. At the same time, we consider a semi-implicit extension in which pixels in a given shell are solved for simultaneously by solving a linear system. We prove (within the continuum limit) that this extension is able to completely eliminate kinking artifacts, which we also prove must always be present in the direct method. Finally, we show that although our results are derived in the context of inpainting, they are in fact abstract results that apply more generally. As an example, we show how our theory can also be applied to a problem in numerical linear algebra.

The paper analyses the problem of class generalisation from the non-traditional point of view—class life cycles. Model of class life cycle represents a process-oriented view on the class which is not usual in the field of conceptual modelling. This paper focuses on the problem of modelling life cycles of generic classes when there is a need to model several life cycles, valid at the same time. The paper shows that this problem is rooted in the natural contradiction of object- and process-oriented approach to modelling following from the fact that these two basic approaches are based on mutually contradicting primary types of hierarchical abstraction. The paper also shows that this problem is closely connected with the “problem of conflicting identities” in generalisation trees discussed on the border of the conceptual modelling and ontology engineering fields.

In the past few years, the world has witnessed severe fires in nightclubs, which have caused many human losses. This paper promotes a methodology which uses evacuation modeling analysis for improving the fire safety strategies (FSS) in nightclubs. The methodology is presented through a study case which represents a nightclub scenario. The results have shown that the use of evacuation modeling analysis can help immensely fire protection engineers to develop their FSS reports, incorporating the human behavior factor; rather than only considering the standard safety factors, such as travel distance. The same methodology can be also applied for fire safety management, which is another key-issue to be properly addressed for fire safety purposes in nightclubs. It is expected that this paper can bring some additional light to the way emergency evacuations are planned and addressed is in nightclubs.